


For Comedic Effect

by MeridianGrimm



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Pre-Klance if you squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-07-20 02:51:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7387612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeridianGrimm/pseuds/MeridianGrimm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pidge gets her hands on blueprints for the lions and has a bit of fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Oort](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oort/gifts).



> Thank you [Oort](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Oort) for being generally awesome and I hope this is what you were looking for :D
> 
> Rated T for potty mouth

Pidge hears footsteps clink across the metal flooring in the corridor and immediately jumps back over to the tool she’s supposed to be repairing for Coran, some analogue to an electric screwdriver that works on magic space ships.  By the time Hunk ambles in with his helmet under his arm, she’s whistling the opening theme to The Next Generation and scrubbing the dirt off a gear from the ten thousand year old piece of machinery.

“Oh, hey Pidge, Allura was looking for you, she was wondering if you’d seen – ah, there they are on the desk.”

“There what are?” Pidge asks innocently.

“She was just looking for the blueprints for the lions, you know, the ones she found in the records room.”  Allura has been down there for weeks trying to learn more about the castle’s capabilities and supplement her knowledge of military strategy.  It’s a good plan, one that Pidge vocally supports because it will give Pidge time to sort through all the data-collection devices stored in a room the size of a small aircraft hangar.  She knows that when Allura exhausts the Altean library, she’ll want to move on to bigger things like catching up on all the history that happened while she and Coran were in the cryo-chambers.  To do that, it will definitely fall to Pidge to figure out how to connect Altean tech with whatever interfaces they find on other planets.  Altea may have been at the height of technology ten thousand years ago, but data interfaces on other planets have developed in different directions since then.  It’ll be like trying to stick a floppy disk into a machine that’s only equipped with USB ports.

Pidge remembers that she’s supposed to answer.  “Ah, yes, those.  They’re just… out.  Allura must have been looking at them earlier and forgot that she left them here.”  What Pidge is planning will work better if no one knows what’s coming.

“Okay,” Hunk says, accepting her lie.  He slides on his helmet and switches on the communicator.  “Hey, Allura, just found them, they’re in the repairs room.  Yeah, Pidge is here.”  He glances around.  “Her helmet’s here, but it’s on the other work table.  Yep, that’s why she didn’t hear you.”  After Allura’s response, he disconnects the mic and removes his helmet.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“It’s fine.”  Hunk rolls up the blueprints and strolls out, leaving Pidge alone.  The only sound in the room besides the hum of the ship is the sigh of someone whose plans have been foiled.  She’d only had a couple more sheets left to memorize when Hunk walked in.  On the upside, though, she’d been smart enough to start with the designs that she’s most likely to exploit.  Namely, the Red and Blue Lions’ blueprints.

Pidge flips open her notebook – not her diary, that’s a decoy now in case Hunk gets his hands on it again – and she begins to write.

* * *

Lance and Keith have been getting along a little better than when they first became paladins, but training exercises still bring out their competitive sides.  From the speakers connecting all five lions, Pidge can hear Hunk’s sighed “not again” as Lance declares a race between himself and Keith to the tallest rock formation ahead.

They’re flying low to the ground and Keith and Lance approach a region with dozens of smaller but no less dangerous rock outcroppings.  Pidge snickers in anticipation.  Lance comes up on a boulder to his left and veers directly into it.  “What the _fuck_ ,” she hears as he bounces off the rock and spins until he can right himself.  “Where did that sucker come from?”

“Oooh, looks like the modification worked,” Pidge declares gleefully, clapping her hands.

Lance is too busy screaming at Keith for “cheating” to hear her, but Hunk speaks up: “What did you do?”

“Oh, not much this time, I just mirrored the video feed to his screen.  He’ll be fine once he clears the rocks and has a straight path.”

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” they all hear as Keith’s lion starts to spin in circles, clipping the rocks around him and jolting wildly.

“Pidge…” Shiro starts, displeasure evident in his voice.

“Once Keith breaks 200 km/h the steering gets twice as sensitive and there’s more power to his left rocket than his right.”

“ _Pidge._ ”

“Hey, I just wanted to see what would happen for scientific purposes.  It’s pretty funny, though, right?”

The Black Lion pulls in front of her, blocking her view of the spectacle, and Shiro looks out angrily from the cockpit at her.  “I’m disappointed in you, Pidge.  What if the Galra attacked right now?  You’ve put the lives of your teammates in danger and impaired our ability to form Voltron.  We have a mission to free the galaxy from Zarkon and that is the most important thing we should be working towards.”

“Aw, c’mon, they’re better pilots than that.”  Pidge checks Keith and Lance’s stats in her notes.  “I’m betting it’ll only take ‘em a couple minutes to work it out and adjust accordingly.  All Lance has to do is invert the steering controls, there’s even a button on his dash to do it, and Keith’s just got to concentrate on the wheel a little more and steer slightly left to go straight.  Uh,” she adds as Keith crashes again, “mostly straight.”

“When we get back, you’re grounded,” Shiro says.

“But they’re learning better control over their lions!  Who knows what crazy things they’ll have to deal with if they get hit in the field!”

“That’s not why you did it.”

True, but Pidge isn’t about to confirm that.  “Give them three minutes, Shiro, and you’ll see the pair of them speeding away towards the finish line again.”

“I dunno,” Hunk says, “I’m thinking it’ll be more like two minutes for Lance. It sounds like he’s less impaired than Keith.”

“You wanna bet?”

“Hunk, Pidge, you two are _not_ betting on your teammates!”

* * *

Keith and Lance come back from their battle chattering about how much they bonded with their lions, and Pidge gets off with a warning.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance is on his guard against Pidge now, but after weeks of watching her work, his constant presence provokes her to pull off another prank.

The next time Pidge is struck with the compulsion to prank her teammates, she's convinced that it’s not really her fault.

Since the first incident, Lance has insisted on being in the room with Pidge whenever she’s doing computer repairs or installing updates on his lion.  Pidge can’t say that his caution isn’t warranted, but it’s still mildly irritating when she has to put off working on Blue until Lance finishes up with whatever he’s doing.  That’s not the worst part, though: being alone in the same room with a thoroughly bored Lance for hours at a time is an exercise in endurance and patience.

“– and so then Keith said ‘the USS Enterprise from the original series was actually 289 meters long, not 200’ like _ugh_ does he have to be so stupidly handsome when he’s talking about science fiction?”  When Lance tires of other distractions and conversation, he tends to default to talking about Keith, which is not bad in itself because it shows how far they’ve come from rivals to grudging friends, but after so many hours of hearing about nothing but Lance’s unrealized crush on Keith, Pidge is tempted to finish what the Galran crystal started and throw him out the airlock herself.

Instead, she pushes down her irritation and continues working.  To distract herself from Lance, Pidge starts to theorize why, out of the four lions besides her own, Blue responds to Pidge the best.  Maybe it’s related to the traits traditionally associated with the blue paladin.  Pidge doesn’t actually know what those traits are, since there’d been an interruption when Allura first handed out Lance's lion assignment, but it’s worth looking into.  It could also be related to the fact that Blue was hidden on Earth, whereas the other lions lay dormant elsewhere.  Ooh.  That might be something.  The lions are supernatural beings with some degree of intelligence.  Blue might be more comfortable with human paladins because she has more background with Terran culture than the other lions.  Ten thousand years is a long time to learn about a species.

Pidge stops typing, suddenly struck with a thought.  Lately she’s been looking into how to download information from other planets to the castle’s databases, but what about the lions?  How much data storage do they have?  What kind of information do they already have downloaded?

She gasps.  Would Blue have pieces of Earth stored in her memory?

“I know, right?” Lance says, oblivious to her revelation.  “Who even watches alien documentaries seriously?  I mean, I guess Keith wasn’t _wrong_ about aliens existing, but seriously, isn’t that something you watch at 3am with your friends when you’re tired enough that everything is funny?”

This new possibility sparks an idea that will tell Pidge more about the lions as well as allow her to exact her revenge on Lance.  It’s a good thing he isn’t looking at her right now, because she couldn’t keep the grin off her face if she tried.  This whole idea is partly his fault - if he'd allowed her to work in peace, then she wouldn't feel compelled to test her hypothesis this way.

“Hey, Blue,” she coos affectionately while Lance starts to reenact a move Keith had tried out in the training deck, “who wants to be a good kitty?  Let’s access any folders that resemble a music gallery…”

* * *

Lance sighs in relief as the hatch closes behind him and Blue.  Today’s battle had been pretty rough, but they had freed another planet from the Galra Empire.  Even though Blue will need considerable repairs, Lance considers today a win.

That reminds him – most of the other paladins had escaped with just scratches, but Keith’s lion was hit pretty badly out there too.  They’d all confirmed that he was okay in the group call, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt to see if he needs a hand sorting out the damaged parts to Red.  Despite the fact that Lance is no engineer and won’t be that much help, he’s found that spending time with Keith - even if it’s just sitting with him at meals or chilling on the training deck while Keith works with the battle droid - helps them stay calmer with each other during periods of high stress.

Lance calls up the communications window and selects the red lion.  Keith picks up after a couple of rings.  “Lance?  Is something wrong?”

“No, I was just wondering –”

The sound of a saxophone suddenly fills the cockpit as Careless Whisper starts blasting in Lance’s lion.

If he hadn’t still been belted in, Lance is sure he would have jumped about a mile. “What the quiznak?!”

“Uh, Lance…”

“Pidge!  It was Pidge, god _damn_ it, I looked away for _one second_ and she did this!  Blue, babe, shut it off please!”  Lance is frantically searching for some kind of music player on the interface to _turn it off_ , blushing furiously at the music choice and cursing Pidge under his breath.  When Lance finally mutes the volume, he looks back up at the video screen sheepishly.  “Sorry about that.  I was just wondering if you wanted some help with Red?”

“Sure.  Where did Pidge get non-Altean music on this ship, though?  Whatever that song is, it’s definitely from Earth.”

Of course Keith doesn’t recognize the song.  “With her, who knows?  I’ll be over in a couple of minutes, alright?”

“See you in a few.”

Keith disconnects the call and Lance immediately selects the green lion from the call screen.  “Careless Whisper, really?” he says without prelude when Pidge answers.

A broad grin spreads across her face.  “Did you like what I found?”

“I can’t believe you.”

“I’m just doing what Shiro said and learning more about the capabilities of our lions, Lance.”  She bats her eyes innocently, but Lance isn’t buying it.

“That’s two I owe you now, Pidge Gunderson, and it is _on_.”

Pidge sits back in her chair with a smile and steeples her fingers like a villain who’s already accounted for your next move.  “You’re certainly welcome to try.”

“You think I can’t get you back?”

“I think you haven’t realized yet the extent of this prank and consequently don’t have sufficient motivation.”

Lance pauses.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I set up that song to play whenever you dial Red from your lion.  What you don’t know yet is what songs will play when you connect to the other lions, or what songs will play when _they_ call _you_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of those rare occasions where I got an idea and wrote the whole thing in almost one sitting, so I'm pretty happy right now.
> 
> [For those of you who haven't heard Careless Whisper ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izGwDsrQ1eQ)
> 
> Special thanks to [Oort](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Oort) for coming up with other songs that Pidge might have incorporated in the prank with me.  
> >>Hunk's lion [rickrolls ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) Lance's lion every time now  
> >>Blue actually likes memes, so after the pranks have been going on for a while, she starts playing [ mmm whatcha sayyy](https://youtu.be/tMpED13pLNg?t=170) after Voltron defeats something  
> >>And I'm pretty sure that when Pidge calls Lance, Blue is set up to play [What's New Pussycat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBdSqk78nHw) 21 times a la [John Mulaney at the Salt and Pepper Diner](http://standupcomedyblog.tumblr.com/post/44292905165/john-mulaney-the-salt-pepper-diner). Pidge couldn't make up her mind at first about what song she wanted to play when Lance calls her, so she left that alone until a few days after the prank went into effect.

**Author's Note:**

> I've marked this fic "incomplete" because I'm not sure whether or not I'll write more.
> 
> Come talk to me on my [tumblr](http://meridiangrimm.tumblr.com) about Voltron.


End file.
